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Saturday, April 18, 2015

Friedrich Jansson freaked out …

Author: Roberto Muehlenkamp

… in two hysterical posts with the telling titles (telling in what they reveal about Jansson’s character, or lack thereof) Muehlenkamp doubles down on stupid and Muehlenkamp lies about Provan. His carpet-biting rage is quite amusing. What follows is my response to Jansson’s hollering in the earlier of these blogs; another blog will address the latter.

Jansson:

After I devoted one post to refuting Roberto Muehlenkamp’s insinuation that the Cimetière des Innocents demonstrates the possibility of remarkably dense burials, and another to pointing out that that Muehlenkamp’s analysis implies that pigs will self-cremate, I was well aware that some spittle from that blogger would soon be flying my way, and indeed, Muehlenkamp has responded with two long-winded blog posts which, however, offer nothing new. In fact, Muehlenkamp is reduced to quoting his manifesto contributions without correcting any of the errors, including one whopper which I pointed out to him a couple of years ago. As I have no intention of serving as a volunteer proofreader for his contribution to the Manifesto version 2, I will not be descending into the details, particularly since Muehlenkamp has not yet bothered to fix all the errors that have been pointed out to him. I will, however, offer some brief comments, but I warn the reader in advance that given how incoherent and vacuous Muehlenkamp’s postings are, these comments are of limited interest.

Hollow bragging, meaningless weasel-words like "long-winded blog posts" (let the audience decide on that, Mr. Jansson), some self-projecting invective (for if anything comes across as "spittle", it is Jansson’s rabid rant) and vacuous claims about "errors" that Jansson is supposed to have pointed out before but I didn’t fix. What errors exactly did you have in mind, Mr. Jansson? And why didn’t you relish in pointing them out, even though I expressly challenged you to do so (I wrote: Perhaps Mr. Jansson, who claims that there are "many numerical errors and erroneous assumptions" in my writings, can point out some numerical errors and/or erroneous assumptions in the above considerations.)? Because it’s all just empty Janssonian blather, or for any reason worth considering?

Jansson:

Before addressing the scanty arguments which Muehlenkamp offers, one preliminary and one methodological point are necessary. First, while Muehlenkamp suggests that I pointed out the fact that he is claiming that pigs are self-incinerating because I was “unable to respond” to his previous blog post. In fact, I had written and scheduled the post in question – and the analysis of Sergey Romanov’s nonsense about fat collection – before Muehlenkamp’s first post appeared.

Ah, so Jansson had another post "scheduled" before responding to mine. I see. And why does Jansson feel compelled to make this assertion? Maybe he thinks he needs to justify himself before his "Revisionist" coreligionists.

Jansson:

Second, Muehlenkamp claims to have “mathematically demonstrated” the possibility of burying a certain number of bodies in a certain burial space. What he means to say is that he has built a mathematical model that spits out the numbers he desires.

No, what I have done is build a mathematical model, based on Mattogno’s own model and further substantiated with the model of Alex Bay, which shows that what becomes apparent from known evidence (if we forget for a moment Alex Bay’s study about Bełżec, whereby there were further graves in the camp’s area than those identified by archaeological core drilling, and the possibility that towards the end of the camp’s operation some victims were burned directly after gassing, without having first been buried), i.e. that the 434,508 documented deportees murdered at Bełżec were buried in the 33 mass graves identified by an archaeological team led by Prof. Andrzej Kola, was physically possible. The mathematically demonstrated possible density, 663.40 kg of human mass in a cubic meter of burial space, is not far above the density that was physically demonstrated in Charles Provan’s experiment, 604.55 kg. The test persons in this experiment were living people, and they were "able to breathe just fine" according to Provan, meaning that there was still some space left in the box not filled by their bodies. Provan's photos suggest that the box could have taken in one or two more bodies, at least of children, if the bodies had needed no breathing space because they were dead. This in turn means that the results of my mathematical model are not purely mathematical but are supported by physical reality as shown in Provan’s experiment.

Jansson:

This is a meaningless accomplishment.

Just because Jansson is unable to refute it, or for any reason worth considering?

Jansson:

It’s always easy to tweak a model to get the results you want; the trick is to make the model correspond to reality.

How exactly am I supposed to have "tweaked" my model, Mr. Jansson? Please explain. As to the model corresponding to reality, there’s the evidence to Bełżec mass murder and mass burial, besides Charles Provan’s experiment.

Jansson:

When reality and a mathematical model conflict, reality is not thereby refuted. The model is.

That may be so, but there would only be a conflict between my mathematical model and reality if there were a physical demonstration that what the mathematical model shows to be feasible is not feasible in physical reality. There is no such demonstration, however. Rather the contrary.

Jansson:

This has evident consequences for Muehlenkamp’s claim that my examination of actual data on burial density is irrelevant because he has built a mathematical model that gives different results.

Jansson still hasn’t understood that his "actual data on burial density" are irrelevant because they come from situations in which circumstances such as an organized attempt to make the most of available burial space and the physical constitution of the mass graves’ "population" were different from those at Bełżec. Provan’s experiment arguably comes closer to replicating these circumstances than any of the pointless "actual data on burial density" that Jansson has filled so much blog space with. Rather than insist on the relevance of his exercises, Jansson should heed my advice: instead of wasting his time on copiously illustrated and just as irrelevant articles about how many corpses or carcasses were buried in how large an area in this and that place, he should try to, say, refute Cole’s arguments based on the Korherr Report, or provide the name of at least one Jew he can prove to have been transited" to the occupied territories of the Soviet Union via Bełżec, Sobibór or Treblinka. Either of these undertakings, if successful, would get "Revisionism" a lot further than Jansson’s musings about burial space.

Jansson:

With regard to the Cimetière des Innocents, Muehlenkamp wastes a lot of words without making any discernible argument, while engaging in extensive but pointless speculation. As he is attempting to use the site to prove that extraordinarily dense burials are possible, he must prove his claims; to speculate as he does on what might have been possible does him no good. If I were claiming that I have a ten-foot vertical jump, I would need to prove that by jumping that high, not speculating that “I may have been able to increase my vertical jump by two feet through the use of special shoes”, “a diet of 100% carrot juice may have added a foot to my vertical jump”, “zinc supplements may have added 23% to my vertical jump”, etc. Muehlenkamp’s speculations, consequently, are worthless and require no response.

First of all, it should be noted that Jansson is now for the second time misrepresenting the purpose of my argument regarding the Cimetière des Innocents. As I pointed out both here and here, the Cimetière des Innocents example is not meant to "prove that extraordinarily dense burials are possible". That proof – which was not mine to make, as the possibility of extraordinarily dense burials follows from the available evidence to what happened at the AR camps, meaning that who challenges that evidence bears the burden of proving that what becomes apparent from that evidence was physically impossible – was provided through my calculations and Charles’ Provan’s experiment. The Cimetière des Innocents example is merely meant to show that there was a parallel to Bełżec and Treblinka of very large amounts of human remains being concentrated in a relatively small area.
Second, Jansson is by means of a false analogy trying to reverse the burden of proof. It is not for me to prove what follows from all related sources about the matter (namely that 1.2 to 2 million people were buried at the Cimetière des Innocents and their remains stayed there until removed to the catacombs). It is for Jansson, who disputes the accuracy of those sources, to prove that what becomes apparent from them couldn’t possibly have been.

Jansson:

Muehlenkamp even suggests that as his model of burial space suggests a much higher burial capacity for the site than that recorded by Henri Bayard, more bodies must of been buried there than historians claim.

I don’t remember having made such suggestion, on the contrary. My key argument regarding the CdI was that

This means that the remains of all people buried in the CdI – whether it was about 1,200,000 according to Henry Bayard (the link was taken from Jansson’s blog), or about 2 million according to other estimates – were inside an area half the size of the burial area of Treblinka extermination camp, either as rotting corpses or skeletons inside the soil or as skulls and bones piled up in the "charniers", by the time the CdI was closed down.

Which means I’m just as comfortable with Bayard’s number as I am with the higher number estimated by others. I later argued that the assumptions on which these numbers are based (2,000 or 3,000 burials per year on average) are realistic, even conservative – but the reason behind this argument was the very high mortality in Paris during much of the cemetery’s existence, and not my calculation model for Bełżec extermination camp.

Jansson:

This is a classical circular argument: Muehlenkamp brings up the Cimetière des Innocents in order to corroborate the results of his modelling of burial space, but now is reduced to assuming the validity of his model in order to refute the history of the very same Cimetière des Innocents.

This is utter nonsense, for the reasons explained above. I neither brought up the CdI as an argument to corroborate the results of my modeling of burial space, nor did I bring up that model to argue that Bayard’s estimate or the higher estimates of others about the number buried at the CdI is wrong. As I’m not inclined – unlike my opponent with his hysterical accusations of "lying" – to infer deliberate misrepresentation, I’ll just assume that Jansson is not a very attentive reader.

Jansson:

The remainder of Muehlenkamp’s analysis, insofar as an argument can be discerned at all, is based on the reasoning that “a lot of people died in Paris over the centuries, and most of them must have been buried in the Cimetière des Innocents. Of course, he offers no substantive sources to prove that so many bodies were buried in this particular cemetery. Having attained “celebrity” status, the Cimetière des Innocents attracts lots of unsubstantiated claims. Repeating these, without confirmation from primary sources, demonstrates precisely nothing.

Actually I provide good reasons to assume that much of the city’s high mortality (which one historian estimated to have reached 2 million in the seventeenth century alone) ended up at the Cimetière des Innocents (and that estimates of the total number buried there by Bayard and others must therefore be considered realistic, if not conservative), namely that it was the largest cemetery in the city – able to accommodate over 170,000 corpses in mass graves at one time according to my calculations (Jansson’s hilariously far-fetched claim was that the cemetery harbored about 7,000 corpses at a time on average), assuming that only half its area was occupied by mass graves and that each grave contained no more than the 1,500 corpses mentioned in several of my sources – and that, besides the "normal" mortality from 22 of the city’s parishes, the CdI took in plague victims from at least those parishes as well as those who had died at the city’s largest hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. One of my sources mentions that 50,000 corpses were buried at the CdI within five weeks during the 1418 plague epidemic. Jansson’s only argument against these sources consists in complaining that they are not primary sources, as if that necessarily made them unreliable, and as if Jansson himself had based his arguments on primary sources alone. Remember that it’s for Jansson to demonstrate that the assumptions and calculations made by historians regarding the CdI’s occupation are mistaken or implausible. If all he has to offer against my arguments in favor of the plausibility of numbers accepted by historians is that the related sources are not primary ones, he’s putting up a very poor show.

Jansson:

Muehlenkamp does make one further argument, which is that when the graves were emptied after a burial cycle, the bones were taken to the ossuaries, and thus remained in a sense on-site. However, what happened after that? Muehlenkamp assumes that several centuries’ worth of bones accumulated in the ossuaries. What proof does he have that no bones were ever removed from said ossuaries? In the next cycle of the graves, or the next, or the next, were the older bones ever removed from the site? Muehlenkamp assumes not, but has no proof.

I don’t need to. It’s for Jansson, as the one disputing a conclusion derived from available sources that mention no such removal, to prove that such removal took place before the cemetery’s contents were evacuated to the catacombs. A secondary source will suffice, but I don’t think there is one, as it would have been impious to remove remains from the holy grounds of a cemetery and the ossuaries inside the cemetery’s walls would probably not have been built in the first place if an alternative considered acceptable under religious aspects had existed. Dropping the remains into the Seine or making them into bone meal and using them as fertilizer was certainly no such alternative.

Jansson:

In short, Muehlenkamp has struck out on all aspects of the Cimetière des Innocents, and has been reduced to incoherent wall-of-text spam that falls short of offering anything to support his initial allegation, namely that the Cimetière des Innocents offers proof of the feasibility of extraordinarily high burial densities.

In short, I never made the original allegation that Jansson falsely attributes to me, and all that Jansson has got to offer against my arguments, which are abundantly substantiated by what sources I could find, are pathetic complaints that the sources in question are not primary ones and even more pathetic demands that I prove a negative (no removal of remains from the cemetery’s ossuaries) when it’s up to him to prove a positive (that such removal took place).

Jansson:

Regarding cremation, Muehlenkamp mainly confines himself to repeating his analysis from the manifesto. He does, however, confirm that be believes that bones and pigs

once ignited, can sustain their own combustion, which in turn means that no more additional fuel is required to combust them than is required to make a fire in which they ignite

Hilariously enough, in the context of the collection of human fat from Auschwitz cremation pyres, Muehlenkamp’s colleague Sergey Romanov has argued that human fat cannot sustain its own combustion, but will stop burning after removal from an external source of heat. Muehlenkamp has even defended this argument himself during forum debate.

Actually Sergey’s argument was that "animal fat, although a good fuel, is unable to sustain its own combustion unless there is a sufficent external source of heat or a suitable porous wick is present" (emphasis added to highlight the part omitted by Jansson). He should have added another possibility mentioned by DeHaan, which is that "the external fire was able to heat the liquified fat well past its flash point" before the fat was removed from the external source of heat. I haven’t read Jansson’s related blog post yet, but I hope for Jansson that he addressed in it the arguments I made starting here.

Jansson:

Another discovery from the great researchers of Holocaust Controversies: human bones are more flammable than human fat!

A straw-man, as I wrote nothing about "merrily crackling fires fueled by bones". My point is that burning bones alone requires less external fuel per weight unit than burning whole corpses or carcasses.

Jansson:

Likewise, the actual experience of mass cremation of livestock contradicts his belief that mass cremation can be attained with a minimal amount of fuel.

"Actual experience of mass cremation of livestock" points to wood-to-carcass weight ratios as low as 2:1 or even 1:1, actually. They may have been guided by considerations other than fuel economy (such as providing sufficient heat to assure that pathogens were thoroughly destroyed rather than distributed over a larger area with the smoke), and they may not have been organized in a very efficient manner. The most fuel-efficient carcass burning experiments known to date, those of German veterinarians Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé, achieved wood-to-carcass weight ratios well below 1:1, and I don’t see why it should not be possible to achieve similar ratios in mass cremation by replicating these veterinarians’ methods on a larger scale.

Jansson:

Now, bones are readily available at the supermarket or butcher. If Muehlenkamp has confidence in his analysis, why does he not buy 20 euros’ worth of bones, pile them up in his back yard, slather them with gasoline or diesel fuel, ignite them, and see what happens? The reason, of course, is that Muehlenkamp is terrified of actual empirical results, which interfere with his freedom to speculate wildly and extrapolate creatively.

Two practical examples shall illustrate what was stated by Mr. Fuhrmann and corresponds to elementary common sense, which Mattogno is obviously alien to. One comes from Argentina, where the following carcass disposal method was worked out due to the scarcity of burning wood[262]:

Lastly, the Argentines have had some success with an alternative method of carcass disposal as trees are markedly absent in their enzootic areas and therefore carcass burning is essentially impossible on site. Instead they soak the carcass and surrounding immediate area with 5-10 percent formaldehyde to decontaminate the area and discourage scavengers; then they cover the carcass with a heavy-duty tarpauline and securely peg it down. Over 240-260 days the carcass decomposes. They then burn off the tarpauline and the remaining bones and grease using 5 L of diesel. For details go to Elimination of the carcasses of animals that have died from anthrax." A problem with this method is that foxes will sometimes not be put off by the formalin and will burrow into the carcass. - Mod MHJ]

According to the site referred to[263], the carcass is allowed to decompose, protected by formaldehyde against scavenging animals, until it only the bones are left. These are then burned together with the 100-micron polyethylene sheet, 6 meter long by 3 meters wide, that covers the carcass, using 5 liters of diesel fuel. The polyethylene probably contributes something to the burning of the bones, as polyethylene has a heating value of 11,000 kcal/kg[264]. 100 microns = 0.0001 meters, so the sheet had a volume of 0.0001 x 6 x 3 = 0.0018 cubic meters or 1,800 cubic centimeters. Polyethylene has a density of up to 0.941 g/cm3, so the sheet covering the carcass may have weighed 1,800 x 0.941 = 1,693,8 grams or ca. 1.69 kg; the heating value of the sheet would thus be 1.69 x 11,000 = 18,590 Kcal. 5 liters of diesel oil, according to my above calculations (see e.g. Table 14) have a heating value of 183,378 BTU or 46,241 kcal. So a total of 18,590 + 46,241 = 64,831 Kcal are being used to burn the bones of this carcass - the equivalent of 20 kg of Mattogno’s low calorific value wood when seasoned [265], or of 18 tons of the fresh wood (3,556 kCal/kg) or 17 kg of the dry wood (3,912 Kcal/kg) considered in Table 11.
Assuming that the life weight of the carcass was 500 kg and that the bones weigh 16 % of that = 80 kg, the wood weight to carcass weight ratio would be 0.25, 0.23 or 0.21. This is way below the rates calculated above on the basis of information about fuel requirements in present-day carcass burning, which are in the order of 2 to 1, and even below the also mentioned rates achieved by veterinarians Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé in the experiments described by a source that both Mattogno and I hold in high esteem, German engineer and cremation expert Wilhelm Heepke. So it becomes obvious from comparing this Argentinian procedure with other modern carcass-disposal methods that burning just bones requires less or much less fuel per weight unit than burning whole carcasses.

Is this Argentine bone-burning empirical enough for you, Mr. Jansson? And what about my calculations of the fuel required, anything wrong there?

Jansson:

To the very limited extent that Muehlenkamp’s post offers anything new, it indicates that he is moving towards placing an increased emphasis on the phenomenon of “spontaneous human combustion”. This quite real phenomenon is somewhat misleadingly named, for it is not truly spontaneous, but involves initiation by an external fire lasting long enough to split the skin and allow rendering of the fat into an absorbent material, allowing gradual continued burning via the wick effect. The phenomenon, which takes place in circumstances quite different from that prevailing in mass cremation, has generally been observed in the case of obese individuals (were the Jews of Poland typically obese, Roberto?), and generally does not consume the entire body, but only most of the trunk.

The Jews of Poland were certainly not obese, but then
a) Jansson’s text suggests that "spontaneous human combustion" has also been observed in non-obese individuals;
b) the carcass used in Ettling’s experiment (see the blog Friedrich Jansson changes the subject) was not obese either (or was it, Mr. Jansson?);
c) that carcass was "mostly consumed by the fire", the pig carcass used by DeHaan et al (mentioned in the same blog) was destroyed more than 60 % by weight, including "reduction of large bones to a fragile, ashen state";
d) the corpses on the AR pyres were not or not always burned completely, some body parts preserving their original shape, and large bones sometimes having to be burned a second time because the first burning had not rendered them friable enough for crushing; and
d) I don’t consider the amount of external fuel contributing to combustion on the AR pyres to have been as small in relation to the corpse weight combusted as in the experiments described by DeHaan et al and Ettling.

These factors considered, a parallel between the mentioned experiments and the AR pyres can be drawn (and actually was expressly drawn by Ettling, well outside the context of any "Revisionist" discussion).

Jansson:

The fact that scientists, intrigued by this rare phenomenon, have managed to replicate it under carefully managed laboratory conditions, has no bearing whatsoever on the fuel requirements of practical mass cremation.

So, what’s the essential difference between the observation in Ettling’s experiment (which seems to have been incidental) and the Treblinka pyres supposed to be (other than scale, of course)? The seat springs would be the grates made of railway rails on which the bodies were placed, the wick the char and ash from the fire used to ignite the bodies. The fire would have to be strong enough for the bodies’ skin to char and split, which was certainly the case according to eyewitness descriptions whereby the wood sprayed with liquid fuel underneath the bodies (who were also sprayed with liquid fuel themselves, at least when they were "fresh" bodies) burned with a very strong and hot flame. In this manner it would have been possible to cremate the bodies of the people murdered in the gas chambers with comparatively little external fuel (i.e. a weight ratio between wood and wood equivalent on the one hand and corpse mass on the other that was equal to or lower than in Lothes & Profé’s experiments), even though the results of cremation were not complete, as mentioned before.

Jansson:

Muehlenkamp has no excuse for the fact that his analysis of fuel requirements for mass cremation ignores all results of mass cremations whose fuel requirements have been documented. (Note: these documented quantities are sometimes only for the initial pyre, and may not include fuel added later. This possible error, however, would work in Muehlenkamp’s favor, so he has no excuse there.)

The accusation that I ignored "all results of mass cremations whose fuel requirements have been documented" is not only dishonest but would more properly have been addressed at Mattogno’s originally concluding on fuel requirements for mass cremation of human beings from his backyard beef-burning experiments. Before arguing that wood-to-carcass weight ratios in documented mass cremations could probably improved by using the method of Dr. Lothes and Dr. Profé (which, in its use of a grate on which the carcass was placed, resembled the methods applied at the AR camps), I provided a number of documented examples of mass cremation and criticized Mattogno et al as follows:

Mattogno, who conducted various experiments burning small amounts of animal flesh, claims that he used 3.5 kg of dry wood per kg of cremated flesh and holds that this ratio reflects wood requirements when burning animal carcasses or human corpses. [65] In their Sobibór book, MGK present several data from the burning of animal carcasses or human corpses that point to similar ratios[66], while not taking into account sources whereby the wood weight to carcass/corpse weight ratio can be much lower. The data they don’t take into account include the following, without limitation:[there follows the list reproduced in my previous article]

Jansson:

If Muehlenkamp’s increasingly desperate appeals to the phenomenon of “spontaneous human combustion” are any indication of the direction in which his contribution to Manifesto-v2 is heading, then we are going to be treated to some entertainment indeed – but nothing of relevance to the problem of mass cremation.

One further vital point: Muehlenkamp complains that the fuel requirement of the cremations to which I referred are higher than those in certain other cases of cremation. (I will spare the reader the tedious demonstration that the figures Muehlenkamp gives for these other cases are often inaccurate. Despite the fact that these errors have been pointed out to him by both the present author and by Carlo Mattogno, he continues to spam the same text, and I have no intention of wasting my time in repeating corrections.)

More of the same. I don’t know what "corrections" by the "present author" the same is talking about, and as to Mattogno’s "corrections", they tend to be as pathetic as his musings about the Dresden pyres discussed in my previous article (deafening silence from Mr. Jansson about this issue) and will be duly addressed as time permits.

Jansson:

Now, Muehlenkamp is drawing comparisons in terms of amounts of wood required per kilogram of carcass mass to be cremated. The sources on mass cremation indicate that cattle require less fuel on a per-kilogram basis than do pigs and sheep. Typically it is stated that four pigs or shorn sheep require the same amount of fuel as a cow, despite the fact that cattle are (at least in the numbers given for the 2001 UK FMD epidemic) 10 times the mass of sheep and 5 times the mass of pigs. The reasons that cattle require less fuel (per unit of mass) are unclear. Perhaps the larger body allows for a longer-burning, more localized fire to make more efficient use of the carcass’ fat mass. Alternately, perhaps this is simply an artefact of the common use quantities of fuel involved in building the pyre in place of the actual total for the cremation. Thus, it may be that more fuel is added to pyres involving cattle after the initial fuel is largely burned down than is added to pyres involving smaller stock, as the larger animals take longer to burn. In this case, the ostensibly lesser fuel requirement on a per-kg basis would simply be the result of poor reporting of data. These possibilities are, naturally, merely speculation.

So cattle require less fuel per unit of mass than pigs, even though pigs have more fat per unit of mass than cattle? That’s not what one would expect, and indeed the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC) General Guidelines for the Disposal of Carcasses, referred to here, suggest differently: "The materials required are wood (in a wood: carcass ratio of from 1:1 to 2:1), diesel fuel for both the fire and the air-curtain fan, and properly trained personnel. For incineration of 500 adult swine, the requirements are 30 cords of dry wood and 200 gallons of diesel fuel.". In the USDA/TAHC report on a carcass burning experiment using an air curtain incinerator system in Pilot Point, Texas, on December 19 - 20, 1994, the following was pointed out:

A very important factor observed during the incineration process was that carcass body fat added significantly to the incineration rate. It was observed that the small carcasses weighing less than 100 pounds [45 kg] were not incinerated as quickly as the carcasses with increased body fat. The body fat appeared to increase the incineration rate and provide higher burn temperatures.

The wood-to-carcass weight ratio in this experiment was 0.58:1 or 1.74:1, depending on how one interprets the report’s information, as I mentioned in this article. About the same or much less than in the examples I last mentioned here.

Jansson:

Whatever the reasons for this phenomenon, when faced with data showing higher fuel requirements on a per kilogram basis for human-sized animals than for cattle, it is deceitful to extrapolate, as Muehlenkamp does, fuel requirements from cattle (or horses) back to humans on a per-kilogram basis.

An extrapolation is not "deceitful" just because it is inappropriate in the opinion of Mr. Jansson, as even Mr. Jansson should be able to understand. Considering the aforementioned report about the Texas swine carcass burning experiment, and the results of the Mokshda Green Cremation System (ratio: 1.43 to 1) in comparison to the examples from cattle burning preceding my mention of this system, one might just as well (or even with more reason) argue that extrapolating from cattle (or horses) back to humans on a per-kilogram basis is conservative.

That said, let’s now move to what I wrote here about the Dresden Altmarkt pyres (where body fat and a wick effect may have contributed to cremation, like in Treblinka) and Mattogno’s related nonsense, and to the question that Jansson preferred to run away from. This question is still standing, Mr. Jansson:

So please tell me, Mr. Jansson, how much gasoline do you think they used to cremate 6,865 corpses (or 10 times that many, if you choose to fall for the doctored version of TB 47) on the Dresden Altmarkt after the bombing of 13/14 February 1945?

Do you accept my calculation whereby it was about 68,000 liters (more than twice the daily consumption of a Panzer division, at a time when Nazi Germany was fighting for survival and its armed forces were running woefully short of fuel)?

Do you think 68,000 liters is too high, as one might think Mattogno does?

Or do you think the amount was twice or three times or four times as high (implying a Panzer division immobilized for lack of fuel not two but four, six or eight days)?